🌼 An Artist Can Turn Anything Into a Story

Writer: Cheryl Quejada Canning | Sydney, May 2026 — 2‑minute read

Excerpt

I’ve always turned small moments into stories. Even now, a fallen flower on a footpath can open a whole world in me — and sometimes, that world becomes a painting. Marahuyo is one of those moments, born from noticing, remembering, and being quietly enchanted by life.

An Artist Can Turn Anything Into a Story

I’ve always believed that artists are born with a strange little gift — we can turn anything into a story. When I was a child, I made up narratives about everything I saw. If a beautiful bird landed near me, I instantly imagined where he came from: Ahh, he flew here looking for a butterfly, they talked, and then…  

My imagination never needed permission. It simply lived in me.

I thought I would outgrow that habit, but here I am at 57, still doing the same thing. I see a dog barking at someone through a window, and suddenly I’m creating a whole backstory about their relationship. A picture, a moment, a tiny detail — it’s enough. Maybe that’s why I paint. Or maybe painting is just another way of telling the stories that never stop forming in my mind.

When I travelled to Sea World with my sisters, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the corals. They were alive, glowing, breathing — and I felt a sudden sadness remembering the corals from the coastal area where I grew up. The ones I saw in aquariums later in life were lifeless, bleached, no longer part of the world they belonged to. That sadness stayed with me.

Maybe that’s why I never liked receiving flowers. I love them, but I want them to live their full life in their own element, not cut short just to decorate a home or become a gift. Beauty deserves to breathe.

One day, while walking along Glebe Point Road on my way to the library, I saw a tiny orange flower lying on the dirt. It was so small, so delicate, and yet it stopped me in my tracks. I picked it up gently — not plucked, not taken from its life — just found. And that little flower became the genesis of my painting MARAHUYO (2023).

“To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wildflower.”  

— William Blake

© Ningjada — MARAHUYO, 2023   Oil on Canvas Panel, 61 × 92 cm   Named after a Tagalog word for the kind of enchantment that arrives in small discoveries, in learning, and in unexpected moments of falling in love.

Marahuyo is an ancient Tagalog word meaning magic or fantasy, but it also speaks of being enchanted by discovery, by learning something new, or even by falling in love. That single fallen flower carried a whole story inside it, and that story became colour, movement, and memory on canvas.

Maybe that’s the truth of who I am: someone who finds stories in small things, who listens to the quiet details of life, who believes that even a fallen flower can open a doorway into wonder.

In the end, maybe this is what my work has always been about — the stories that rise from the smallest things, the quiet enchantments that wait in ordinary moments, the way a single fallen flower can open a doorway into colour, memory, and meaning. These are the spaces I paint from, the in‑between places where life whispers its magic before I even realise I’m listening.

Somewhere in the in‑between, another quiet story is forming. I’ll meet it when it arrives.